In Pursuit of Eliza Cynster (33 page)

So she had no hesitation in stating her need and inviting him to fulfill it. To let desire rise up through her body, let it spread beneath her skin and resonate with her heartbeat as she pressed her lips to his.

And tempted.

Beckoned and lured.

Then he accepted her invitation, closed his hands about her breasts, and she suddenly had to break from the kiss and let her head fall back on a gasp.

As she rode the crest of rising pleasure.

A pleasure that welled, swelled, and swept her on.

She let it, went with it, ready and eager to see where he would lead her, what he would show her tonight, yet some small sliver of her mind remained attuned to him, watched and catalogued all the little signs.

Like the tension that invested his features, the hard edge rising passion lent the austere planes, the passionate plundering of his lips and tongue as he, button by button, garment by garment, stripped her. Bared her.

To the moonlight spearing through the uncurtained window.

The silvery glow bathed her body in pearlescent light, limning limbs impossibly graceful, gilding her lush curves and erotically shading her hollows; Jeremy could barely breathe, lungs tight, constricted, as with his eyes he drank in her beauty. As with his hands he sculpted and paid homage, as with his lips he traced and savored, and devotion, heavy and real, grew and burgeoned within him.

Anchored him. In the here and now, in the whirling maelstrom of their passions.

His intent was clear in his mind; to give her all she wished, all she wanted — fulfill every desire she had — but to rein himself back and keep himself from falling into the seething cauldron of ravenous desire that surged and swelled between them.

As he hadn’t been able to last night.

It wasn’t that he imagined she had any real desire to rip his wits away, not even any true conception that she might. His wish to remain wholly captain of his own will tonight was driven more by the need to reassure himself that he could — that he could engage with her, fulfill her hunger, bring her to completion and find his own in her, and still be in control.

As he usually was.

As he always had been with all his previous lovers.

But they had never touched him and made him burn, had never taken him into their arms and made him lose touch with reason.

He was a scholar, a man of rational thought and cautious, intelligent action. Last night, for long moments he’d been beyond the reach of will and mind, suborned by, submerged in, a different reality, but that had to have been because the situation in its entirety had been new to him. Novel and distracting.

Last night, he’d been distracted. Tonight, he intended to remain fully in command, and that, he reasoned, would set the tone for their future engagements.

And then he’d be safe. All would be well.

That had been his conclusion, but he’d reasoned without her.

Without the sudden boldness with which she, naked and feylike in the silvery moonlight, gripped his jacket and peeled it from him.

Without the sultry demand with which she opened his shirt, then, eyes on his face, spread her hands and devoured.

Devoured by touch, and then by taste.

Razed his control with sensation.

Head falling back, he fought to hold on to some semblance of restraint as she undressed him, freely caressing, exploring, learning … every little touch that made him shudder.

Until he stood in the moonlight, as naked as she, while her hands drifted, increasingly bold …

Dragging in a breath, desperate to create some mental distance for long enough to find his mind, he grasped her shoulders and tipped, tumbling them both onto the bed.

She laughed and rolled with him, but when he would have rolled her beneath him and filched the reins, she wrestled and insisted, and the lead passed back and forth, with first him, then her, in the ascendancy, madly pushing the other on …

Flames erupted and raced over them, until they were panting, skins damp, gasping, grasping, desperate and urgent, and far beyond thought.

She parted her thighs in wordless, mindless, abandoned invitation. With one powerful thrust, he sheathed himself in her — and the conflagration roared.

And vaporized all intentions, cindered all caution, razed all reservations.

Whipped on by unrelenting passion, he rode her hard, and she clung and urged him on. Openly demanding, writhing beneath him.

As if in shedding her youth’s attire, she’d converted into a woman in a far deeper sense than simply in appearance.

As if in exchanging breeches for skirts, she’d released, unleashed, a vibrant, sensual woman — one she was determined to let have her way.

To let that sensual wanton infuse her, transform her, conquer her — and willfully conquer him, too.

He couldn’t hold against her pull, against the thundering demand to join with her in the madness, the fury, the escalating mind-numbing pleasure of their flat-out, desperate race to completion — because that demand came from within him, not from her.

She was the lure, the potent invitation, but the acceptance came from somewhere deep inside. She connected to him, to some deeply buried essence of him, and effortlessly called it forth.

And he could do nothing but surrender. Linking his fingers with hers, slanting his lips over hers, letting his tongue tangle wildly with hers, whole and complete in a way that rocked him to his soul he danced with her, joined with her as the swirling currents of crystalline passion and searing desire swept them up and on.

Then shattered them. Pierced them, racked them, and broke them, then tossed them into a sea of oblivion where bliss rolled in, enfolded, and soothed them.

Filled them with glowing golden delight, then gently laid them down on some distant shore, satiated, satisfied, beyond replete.

Wrapped in each other’s arms.

Far from the crisp, clean sheets he’d been looking forward to stretching out between, the laird found himself settling for the night on a pile of straw.

Scrope, blast the man, hadn’t halted in Jedburgh. Or rather he’d stopped for a pint but hadn’t stayed. Instead, he’d driven on in the gig he’d confiscated, his horse pacing behind, and stopped for the night in a tiny tavern in the equally tiny hamlet of Camptown.

Roughly midway between Jedburgh and the border, Camptown boasted no other place a traveler might lay his head, and the tavern was far too tiny for there to be any chance of the laird putting up there while avoiding Scrope’s notice.

Up until that point he’d been considering simply overhauling Scrope, reading him the riot act and sending him on his way, dallying long enough to see his fleeing pair go safely past in whatever conveyance they managed to arrange. Then he could head directly north for the highlands.

That plan had grown increasingly attractive.

Until Scrope had stopped in Camptown.

Why Camptown?

That was a question McKinsey couldn’t answer — to which he couldn’t remotely imagine an answer. There were far more comfortable places Scrope could have stopped. Why there? What was the man planning?

Settling deeper into the straw in the hayloft of the barn in the field opposite the tavern, his arms crossed behind his head, his gaze fixed on the dusty rafters above, the laird reexamined the current situation.

His plan of chasing Scrope off had one serious flaw; he’d already done it once, in Edinburgh, and it hadn’t worked.

Scrope, it seemed, was fixated on completing his mission despite having been dismissed. To have followed the pair this far — to have followed
him,
his recent employer who had in no uncertain terms dismissed him, in order to pick up the pair’s trail — bore witness to Scrope’s unbending, unswerving drive to seize his target, regardless of any alteration in circumstance.

If he again attempted to send Scrope packing … what was to stop the man from circling around, waiting until Eliza and her gentleman passed by somewhere near the border crossing — as they would at some point have to do — and then following the pair on into England?

He himself couldn’t afford the time to follow the fleeing couple and play nursemaid all the way to London.

But once the pair came trotting past … if he
then
delayed Scrope and kept him from following them in reasonable time, Scrope would lose their trail.

That was what he needed to do — delay Scrope enough to allow Eliza and her rescuer to race far enough ahead. Far enough to reach some place of safety; he’d seen enough of Eliza’s gentleman to be reasonably confident that he would have some place in mind, and make a beeline for it, getting the pair of them off the main roads in the process.

So he would wait until the pair appeared, then collar Scrope and hold him back. An hour or two should see Eliza and her gentleman safely away.

And with any luck, tomorrow would see the job done. Wherever the pair was, St. Boswells, Jedburgh, or anywhere in between, on horse or in a gig, they had a straight and rapid run to the border.

Tomorrow it should be.

And then he would ride north, home, to his castle.

Decision made, his mind shifted to the increasingly urgent arrangements he would need to make as soon as he reached home.

The prospect hung over him like a black cloud, but there was no help for it; he’d been too nice in arranging for others to effect the kidnap of the two elder Cynster girls, telling himself that if he himself hadn’t been their kidnapper, he would stand a better chance of persuading them to aid him in return for all and everything he would lavish on them once they married.

The truth was he’d been deeply, fundamentally, rebelliously resistant over being forced by his mother to stoop so low as to kidnap any female. To dirty his hands in such a way. To sully his honor.

Honor above all.
The family motto. He hadn’t wanted to be the one to bring his name into disrepute.

All very well, but honor wouldn’t keep his people safe, and courtesy of the failed attempts to seize Heather and now Eliza, he was left with a stark and unavoidable, last and final chance.

The one option he’d wanted to avoid.

He, personally, would have to kidnap Angelica Cynster.

From the first, he’d set his sights on dealing — treating — with either Heather or Eliza. At twenty-five and twenty-four years old, they were nearer in age to his own thirty-one, were more or less on the shelf marriage-wise, and should therefore, he’d reasoned, have been more amenable to rational discussion and an amicable arrangement.

He’d seen both Heather and Eliza years ago, during the years he’d spent in London before his father’s last illness had called him back to the highlands. He could vaguely recall attending balls at which they’d been present, but he’d never sought any closer acquaintance, had never ventured to ask them for a dance; in those days, he’d been looking not for a wife but rather for a good time, and as bright-eyed young ladies, the Cynster princesses had held little interest for him.

Not then. Now … he would have infinitely preferred to have been able to deal with Heather, the eldest, or if not her, Eliza.

Angelica, the youngest sister, was an entirely different kettle of female.

He’d never met her — she hadn’t been out when he’d been on the town — but he’d learned enough in a very short time to have fixed on her elder sisters as his better options. For a start, Angelica was a bare twenty-one years old; he had little doubt that she would still possess the starry-eyed expectations of a young and very tonnish young lady, especially when it came to the subject of marriage.

Rescripting her expectations … would certainly prove a harder task, a higher hurdle, than would have been the case with either of her sisters. But more than that, at twenty-one Angelica was far from her last prayers; asking her to do what was needed to save his people would feel much less fair than it would have with her sisters.

But he no longer had the luxury of indulging in such nice sentiments — not now he’d stepped back from interfering between Heather and her savior, Breckenridge, and Eliza and her gentleman, whoever he was. He knew why he had; he couldn’t — simply could not — stomach the notion of forcing any woman who already loved another to make do with him, to take his hand rather than that of her true knight, her true beloved.

That wasn’t romantic but sensible; he needed a woman who would stand by his side and work with him, not a well-born lady who would hate and resent him for the rest of their days.

So Angelica it would now have to be, even if, by all accounts, she was … fiery. As fiery as the red and copper glints in her hair. Which, given his own temperament, did not auger well for a calm and well-ordered future — not for him or her.

Of the three sisters, she was the one he hadn’t wanted to go near.

Had, from the very inception of his plan, all but crossed off his list.

Fate, it appeared, had had other plans.

The way matters now stood, he had no choice. It was kidnap Angelica Cynster, or lose his home, his lands, and see his people dispossessed and turned out into the world with not much more than the clothes on their backs.

The highland clearances had wreaked havoc with the clans. His own clan, the one he now headed, had largely escaped the turmoil, thanks to the inaccessibility of the glen and his grandfather’s political canniness in playing all sides off, each one against the others.

The old man had been an expert juggler; it was his legacy the laird was now so focused on protecting. His father had done little, either way, other than to make the deal that now hung over his head.

That deal itself wasn’t the problem; he had been a witness to it, had considered it a fair and sensible arrangement at the time, and still did.

It was his mother’s hijacking of the ancient goblet that stood at the heart of that deal that was the earthquake rocking the ground beneath his feet.

He stared up through the waning moonlight, not truly seeing the roof above his head.

With every step he’d taken, every move he’d made in his plan to reclaim the goblet, he’d questioned his direction, yet each questioning had left him more committed, not less.